DIY an Arduino-Powered Phonograph MP3 Player

“The problem with high tech music players is they don’t have any flash! They non conspicuously just produce music from a drab dull lifeless box. In the times of early music the mechanisms to reproduce sound were fantastic. They gave you something to watch and admire while you listened to your favorite music.

My goal was make a music player with a mechanism that simulated a phonograph design but actually was just for aesthetics, and use modern digital media for the actual music. The combination of nostalgia with the modern components like an LCD screen, microcontroller and SD song storage would round this out as a unique build.”

Starting from this concept, for his project the maker castvee8 was inspired by the wonderful Victor Victrola phonograph.

The device, plays digital music with the help of an Arduino Uno. Instead of simply emitting the tunes, however, the speaker is augmented with 3D-printed parts to make a horn assembly, and pushed over a CD spinning on a turntable using a worm drive. This creates the illusion that it’s playing digital music in a strange mashup of ‘90s tech and vintage vinyl record players.